Research IT Support (RITS)

Help for Healthcare Harm is a public website offering self-help resources to people who have experienced harm in healthcare. The RITS team developed the website, populated it with content provided by the research team, and integrated the website with a Qualtrics survey that assesses the impact of healthcare harm and asks participants to assess their experience with the self-help website.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Bridget Klest.

The RITS team designed and developed the website to house all project information and results from this rich research project. Decolonizing Film Festival Research in a Post-Pandemic World proposes a first step in the process of decolonizing film festival research by bringing together an international team of African film festival researchers to investigate methods to decolonize festival research.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Sheila Petty, Professor, Faculty of Media, Arts & Performance, University of Regina
Co-Principal Investigator: Dr. Estrella Sendra, Professor, King's College London

This website is also a part of the Research Sites Hub.

The RITS team assisted the U of R Centre on Aging and Health and the Health and Psychology Laboratory, with the development of new, fully responsive, website design and with the transfer of content from their old websites.

The websites are part of a new initiative of the RITS team, the Research Sites Hub.

The RITS team assisted the Pain and Aging Lab (PAL) in the Health and Psychology Laboratory, with the transfer of the PACSLAC-II, a server-based app, from the University of Alberta to the University of Regina and with the improvement of features of this app.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Hadjistavropoulos. Professor, Department of Psychology

The RITS team assisted the Pain and Aging Lab (PAL) in the Health and Psychology Laboratory, with the development of an app designed to help caregivers of older adults with dementia self-manage the stress associated with caregiving, prior to testing the app in a clinical trial evaluation.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Hadjistavropoulos. Professor, Department of Psychology

Online Therapy Unit (OTU) is an online platform that provides effective clinical treatment programs to individuals experiencing mental health difficulties. Participants in the program complete modules and receive one-on-one support through online messaging. They also train graduate students and therapists to deliver internet-based cognitive and conduct multidisciplinary research.

Working with the OTU is an excellent example for the RITS Team to the University of Regina's research community.

Executive Director: Dr. Heather Hadjistavropolous

PSPNET is an online platform that specializes in Internet-delivered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (ICBT) for first responders and other public safety personnel (PSP).  They take what is typically shared in face-to-face therapy and share it online in an easy-to-understand way that is convenient and private. Part of the Canadian Institute for Public Safety Research and Treatment (CIPSRT), housed at the University of Regina. They have staff working in various parts of Canada. PSPNET is committed to delivering exceptional online mental health care to PSP.

The founder is Dr. Heather Hadjistavropolous and the co-investigator is Dr. R. Nicholas Carleton.

A global action tackle box that provides the materials and tools to examine and reflect upon current beliefs about, and understandings of child sponsorship (CS). The contents of this tackle box are drawn from a research study, which aimed to "move beyond CS" by cultivating a deeper understanding and critique of CS and to explore alternative critical and justice-oriented actions. This fully responsive wordpress website was designed by the RITS team.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Kathleen Nolan, Professor, Faculty of Education

The RITS Team assisted the Pain and Aging Lab (PAL) in the Health and Psychology Laboratory to integrate hardware components with an algorithm designed to detect facial expressions of pain in real time. This assisted with the PAL’s goal to ‘See Pain More Clearly’ and develop proof-of-concept materials for future developments and implementation in applied products.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Hadjistavropoulos, Professor, Department of Psychology

Vista (Visual Twitter Analytics) is a research project focusing on the development of visual analytics tools that support the exploration of temporally changing topics and sentiment within Twitter. The RITS Team developed a proof-of-concept to re-engineer the existing data collection backend and visualization platform.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Orland Hoeber, Professor, Department of Computer Science

Healthy forests involve complex interactions between many organisms, and new, novel techniques are being applied to solve large, long-standing questions in ecology. Working with the Forestry Dynamics Lab, the RITS Team consolidated and strengthen existing code to form a robust program that could be repeatedly employed for yearly surveys to conduct individual tree detection and calculate biomass using several machine learning algorithms.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Mark Vanderwel, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology

Taking offline program content, the RITS Team digitized "Post-traumatic Stress Injury" training materials for Public Safety Personnel (PSP) into an interactive, accessible online platform.

This process involved construction of a Moodle-based course, involving custom plugins, focusing on an Emotional Resiliency training course.